Category: Typography

Automatic hyphenation is an important tool to help you make text, especially in narrow columns, look good.

History

QuarkXPress has always featured an automatic hyphenation engine. In the early days it was improved frequently. Since Version 6.5, QuarkXPress uses technology provided by Dieckmann, which is seen as the best hyphenation engine available to-date.

“Extended 2” (in preferences) is the Dieckmann-based method.

Importance

The importance of automatic hyphenation is determined by two main factors: Language and amount of text.

Language; some languages have shorter words, whereas others have longer words, especially languages where words are compounded. English tends to use rather short words (with the exceptions, e.g. scientific articles). German words tend to be rather long, as they are being compounded. A good example is “Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung” (motor vehicle liability insurance), which is even frequently used. In average, French has a bit shorter words than German; whereas Italian, Greek and Turkish words are typically even a bit longer.

And of course the amount of text has an effect: If you just have one sentence or one paragraph, you can hyphenate by hand. If you have several pages or even hundreds of spreads, you probably want an automatism to do this for you, ideally without having to check every instance.

What is hyphenation strictness in QuarkXPress?

QuarkXPress offers many parameter to fine-tune hyphenation, which can be found in the “Edit > H&Js” menu.

New in QX2018 is the “Strictness Level“. When you open a document last saved in QuarkXPress 7, 8, 9, 10, 2015, 2016 or 2017, then the “As 2017 and earlier” field will be enabled for H&J.

Strictness levels are defined like this:

1 – Hyphenate compounds words only, so maybe the best for titles and headlines.
2 – A few more hyphenations than level 1.
3 – Hyphenate where it still looks good, probably the best level to start with.
4 – Hyphenate many words but not where it might look strange.
5 – Hyphenate everywhere, where grammatically correct, best for very narrow columns.

QuarkXPress doesn’t offer pre-defined H&Js for the five levels above, so please create your own ones (or change the existing ones) based on your personal choice and aesthetic.

Example

On the left, you see English text with strictness level 4 (default in QuarkXPress 2018 for ‘Standard” H&J).

Available for many Languages

Strictness levels in QuarkXPress 2018 are available for all languages where QuarkXPress offers hyphenation.

QuarkXPress 2018 offers hyphenation for the following languages:

Bulgarian

Catalan

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch

English (British)

English (US)

Estonian

Finnish

French

German

German (Reformed)

German (Swiss)

German (Swiss Reformed)

Greek

Hungarian

Icelandic

Italian

Latvian

Lithuanian

Norwegian (Bokmal)

Norwegian (Nynorsk)

Polish

Portuguese (Brazilian)

Portuguese (European)

Romanian

Russian

Slovak

Slovenian

Spanish

Swedish

Turkish

Ukrainian

Two-minute Demo Video

Here’s a 2 min video demoing how to create and apply strictness levels:

Quote by a QuarkXPress user

»The new hyphenation levels further enhance QX’s already outstanding hyphenation correctness, which we have seen for years«, says Thomas Schuerger, editor and co-responsible for layout with German trade magazines like bauMAGAZIN and bauSICHERHEIT.

»We have already used a combination of the long existing H&J flexibility with the new hyphenation strictness levels of QX2018 in several magazine productions. For perfect looking (small) text columns in form of not strange hyphenations either, nor large empty spaces between words in justified text, one would have to learn that the H&J minimum syllable length (›before‹ and ›after‹ setting) might have to be reduced compared with common practice up to QX2017.

The hyphenation strictness levels on their own will ensure a correct and mostly good visual hyphenation, which should not be ›broken‹ with a more traditional attempt of preventing ugly hyphenations with a larger syllable minimum length. At least for German, with its often very long compound words. Otherwise it is just like math with now two involving multiplication factors, where there only used to be one«, says Schuerger, who has been working with QuarkXPress for more than two decades. He and his colleague Brigitte Weixler also use the new hyphenation level 1 for unjustified text in German as well for unjustified picture captions.

»Level 1 reduces vastly the importance of H&J’s ›auto hyphenation‹ settings for unjustified picture captions – and saves a lot of time to eliminate ›sloppy‹ looking hyphenations on prominent visual parts of a magazine page. «

Both an engineer and a layout artist, Matthias bridges the gap between technology and people.

Before joining Quark, Matthias pioneered print, Web, and multimedia products for multiple German publishing companies. Since 1997 he has played a central role in shaping Quark’s desktop and enterprise software.
Starting 2003 Matthias has focused on Quark’s interactive and digital publishing solutions. He is an active participant in design and publishing communities and represents Quark in the Ghent PDF Workgroup.

Since February 2014 Matthias heads Quark’s Desktop Publishing business unit and is therefore responsible for QuarkXPress.

Andrea Astolfi is a creative professional with over 25 years of experience in electronic publishing. Andrea is based in Italy and specializes in the production of books and long documents, characterized by the presence of many images and illustrations.

Can you use OpenType features in HTML5?

Does QuarkXPress allow you to use OpenType features in HTML5?

Yes, starting with QuarkXPress 2018, OpenType features such as ligatures can also be used in live text in Digital layouts. Before QX2018 this was restricted.

If you haven’t tried it, QuarkXPress can create pixel perfect Digital layouts that you can export as HTML5 and create a flip-book style HTML5 Publication. Either static or with rich interactivity. You can also easily convert Print layouts to Digital layouts.

It’s easy to apple OpenType in Digital layouts:

Create a Digital layout via “File > New > Project” (Command+N) and choose “Digital”.
(Alternatively you can convert a Print layout to a Digital layout.)

In Preferences make sure that you enabled “OpenType support for Digital”.

Use a font that has OpenType features such as ligatures.

Export as HTML5 (or ePub or native app)

Preference to enable OpenType support for HTML5

Example

In QuarkXPress create a text box and use a font that offers OpenType features. This example uses the Vollkorn font, a free typeface: http://vollkorn-typeface.com/

This is how it looks like in QuarkXPress 2018.

Top of the table: On the left side the ligature feature has been applied in QuarkXPress, on the right side it hasn’t.

Lower part of the table: See other features like kerning applied or Oldstyle numbers and real fractions.

iPhone layout in QuarkXPress 2018

When you export, this is how it will look like (here: Safari 11.1):

Exported layout in browser

(Please note in above screenshot that you can select the individual letters of the ligature!)

Of course this will work in other browsers too, like Chrome or Firefox, on Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows.

Live Example

If you want to see the live example in your own browser, please click here:

Bottom line

Now that all modern browser and QuarkXPress support OpenType functionality in HTML5, you can use rich typography both in Print and HTML5 publications. Use it in Web Apps (HTML5 Publications), ePubs or native apps (that use HTML5 for content).

Nice side effect: If you plan to replicate your print layout as a digital layout and you have used OpenType features, then your HTML5 Publication will look the same as the print layout and stays live text (searchable, no image).

Both an engineer and a layout artist, Matthias bridges the gap between technology and people.

Before joining Quark, Matthias pioneered print, Web, and multimedia products for multiple German publishing companies. Since 1997 he has played a central role in shaping Quark’s desktop and enterprise software.
Starting 2003 Matthias has focused on Quark’s interactive and digital publishing solutions. He is an active participant in design and publishing communities and represents Quark in the Ghent PDF Workgroup.

Since February 2014 Matthias heads Quark’s Desktop Publishing business unit and is therefore responsible for QuarkXPress.

Since the introduction of OpenType fonts, there hasn’t been a big change in typography. Until color fonts emerged. Their birth probably was in 2010 when Apple added colorful emoji, which we all have been using since on our mobile.

However – due to the lack of color fonts – designers have always been using colorful fonts; mostly by taking an existing font and converting it to boxes and then changing its shape, its outline, adding colors or blends. So they weren’t fonts anymore but looked like type.

“Stroke text” is another use case where designers add a colorful border to live text, often also even dashed or stripped. And working around the issue that kerning and overlapping suddenly needed to be adjusted.

Color fonts represent a key evolution in typography. They add rich graphic features into font files. And as they behave like standard fonts, once design applications support them, they are easy to use and easily accessible for millions of creatives.

And they are fun!

Color fonts can impact any type of text, can contain multiple colors, shades, textures, blends and transparency. And even animations (ok, now that’s hard to print ;-)

Are there different formats for color fonts?

Yes. There are four different formats and some formats support both vector and bitmap:

Color Font format

Bitmap?

Vector?

Format?

Apple SBIX

✔

Proprietary

Google CBDT

✔

Proprietary

Microsoft COLR

✔

Based on OpenType

W3C SVG
(OpenType SVG)

✔

✔

Based on OpenType

All modern browsers support some format of color fonts, but not all. For example, Google’s CBDT is only available in Chrome on Android.

Which creative pro applications for print design support Color Fonts?

Full support in Illustrator CC 2018, Photoshop CC 2018 and QuarkXPress 2018

Photoshop CC 2017 was the first application to support bitmap color fonts. With the release Photoshop CC 2018 also vector color fonts are supported.

Illustrator CC 2018 is the first version of Illustrator to support color fonts, both vector and bitmap.

And QuarkXPress 2018 is the first version of QuarkXPress to fully supports color fonts, both bitmap and vector; in the formats SVG, SBIX and COLR.

Both an engineer and a layout artist, Matthias bridges the gap between technology and people.

Before joining Quark, Matthias pioneered print, Web, and multimedia products for multiple German publishing companies. Since 1997 he has played a central role in shaping Quark’s desktop and enterprise software.
Starting 2003 Matthias has focused on Quark’s interactive and digital publishing solutions. He is an active participant in design and publishing communities and represents Quark in the Ghent PDF Workgroup.

Since February 2014 Matthias heads Quark’s Desktop Publishing business unit and is therefore responsible for QuarkXPress.

When QuarkXPress introduced colour Open Type transformations in 2016, there was just one font, Chartwell, that could take advantage of them. Chartwell was a neat trick: you type in numbers, and it turns them into graphs and charts. But Chartwell was expensive, and it only offered a few, fairly basic, chart types. Times have moved on: with more support, more font makers are making self-transforming icon fonts. But they’re hard to find (mainly because there’s no established word to describe them). It’s time to have another look, because there’s a lot more available now, and some of it is free.

Essentially, all of these fonts take advantage of the programming capabilities in OpenType. Fonts have been available for 20 years that offer you pie charts, but these depend on having one glyph for every different pie. These looked quite cool at the time, but they really only offered one colour fonts, and could only show 10%, 20%, 30% and so on, with just one thing. Self-transforming fonts are like going from candles to colour changing LED lights.

The fonts we’re going to look at are Chartwell version 2, Amazing Infographic, AtF Spark and Clocko. Amazing Infographic and Spark are available for free, Clocko for a few dollars, and Chartwell for $25 for a single style, and around the $300 mark for all eighteen styles. Chartwell, Amazing Infographic and Spark do charts and graphs, while Clocko does (you guessed it) clocks.

If you’re interested in how the trick is done, OpenType has a basic programming language built into it so that, when you type ‘if’ it can set the correct ligature (QuarkXPress can do this for non-OpenType fonts as well), or combine a letter and its accent. As OpenType has grown up, this has steadily advanced, so that there are now all kinds of tricks that can be done. These are designed to make creating and managing fonts and their variants easier and more consistent, but, as with anything, clever people quickly start finding other uses for them. Before you start reaching for the trial version of FontLab VI to make your own, you ought to know that creating self-transforming fonts require a fairly unique pairing of design and programming skills, and a lot of work.

But you don’t need to be able to create them to make use of them.

Use case

First, though, what’s the use case?

Let’s see. You’re doing a corporate report, and the PR team who wrote it want you to include lots of little bar and pie charts. They’ve helpfully sent you a hundred Excel charts to include, each with about five numbers in them. Now, you could copy and paste all these charts as native objects, reformat them all to match the corporate style and then paste them one by one anchored in the text, but, first, this is a lot of work, and, second, you can just bet that they’re going to come back at the last minute and want to change half the numbers, or, worse, decide that the bars should be pies, the pies lines, and the lines circles.

Now, I have to say that, when I first bought Chartwell, I was doing exactly that, and it was a fairly simple business decision to pay the $300 and save myself a couple of days work, which, within the total project price, was a win for me, and a win for my customer.

Chartwell

The original Chartwell could do a few things, but version 2, which has now been repackaged into a co-ordinate series and a volume/area series, does areas, lines, rings, roses, radars, bubbles, scatters, and floating lines. You can’t delete your copy of Excel yet, but almost anything that will actually look clean and good in a corporate report can be achieved with Chartwell.

In use, it’s very easy:

You just type in the numbers, put a + between them, and then turn the Open Type feature ‘discretionary ligatures’ to on. The one annoying thing about Chartwell is that the charts come out quite small, so you have to blow them up. To use different colours, you have to have the QuarkXPress preference Project: General: Allow OpenType Transformations on Mixed Colour Text turned on.

If you add particular prefixes, such as A=, you get gridlines. What you get depends on which font variant you’re using, but the instructions are clear and comprehensive, though I find I have to look them up again every time for anything complicated.

This is all well and good, and if you’ve got a job coming up that will pay for them, it’s an easy purchase to make.

Amazing Infographic

On the other hand, if you just want to play around, or you’ve got those kind of clients who demand everything but are never willing to pay for it, then investing $300 might seem a bit of a stretch. In that case—or if you just like having different options—then you should definitely take a look at Amazing Infographic. This font does bar charts, circle charts, pie charts and people icons. The syntax is a little different. For the examples at the top, you would type in @c@c099% @b@b6262% @p@p8787%. Like Chartwell, you can change the colours, and, unlike Chartwell, you can put numbers in charts, regularly coloured or reversed out. Your corporate clients might be more demanding on having exactly the type of chart they want, but, for a bit of fun, a newsletter, or pitching to the client what you could really do if they only had the budget, Amazing Infographic will do the things you’re most likely to want, and for free.

AtF Spark

AtF Spark is made for creating sparklines, which are those in-line charts which you see in the financial pages of newspapers, and anywhere else people can think of putting them. Spark is also free. To quote Edward Tufte, who popularised them, “A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution.” The Spark font does bars, rows of dots, or dot lines. Again, the format is slightly different. For the examples at the top, you would type: {10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90,100} 4,1,5,6,1,5,4,2,3,4,2,5,4,2,5,7,3,5,8,7,7,7,8,9}, and you select a different variant from the six Spark fonts. Unlike Chartwell, AtF Spark has been exactly sized to fit on the line, and works (as it were) ‘out of the box’.

Clocko

For a change of pace, Clocko makes clocks. At only $5, I bought it because I just couldn’t resist it, even though I didn’t actually have a commercial use for it at the time (and still don’t). In interface terms, it could teach all of the others something about user-friendliness. All you do is type in the time, like 12:23, and then set the font to Clocko. If you make an error, it just displays the numbers you typed. If you put a letter of the alphabet in front, you get different frames for the clock. In the examples at the top, I typed x12:23 y14:22 z1:32. As with the others, you can alter the colours, though this is not as useful (or attractive) as it is in regular charts.

What’s next?

So far as I know, these are the only infographic type fonts which use OpenType transformations (I would be very interested in hearing about any others). There are a lot more fonts out there which use the transformations the way they were designed. But more will be along. Over the last year, the OpenType specification has gone through another round of expansion, and we’ll be seeing ever more possibilities. Right now, available colour fonts and variable fonts are at the strictly novelty stage, but we’re going to be seeing some genuinely useful examples appearing over the next twelve months.

Perhaps as importantly, the latest iteration of FontLab, which is arguably the most significant font design tool, makes the business of designing harmonious, well-balanced and well-kerned fonts, and manipulating them with OpenType substitutions, dramatically quicker than it was previously—although long-term users are complaining that it looks and feels different.

The other thing to keep an eye on is font-licensing. There are still, regrettably, amateur designers putting out fonts marked as ‘for personal use only’. Some websites tell you about this before you download them, but, with others, you have to check the license carefully when you get them. My rule is: if I can’t use it for every project, then it doesn’t get space on my system. Mercifully, we are seeing more fonts issued under the SIL font license, which protects the font name (so we don’t have a thousand unofficial variations on the same font), but allows derivative versions and modifications.

Quark Software announced on September 17th a new software bundle offer that will save designers Read more

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